The unique “folding-hands”<wbr> wiper arrangement looks to have been retained atop the steeply raked – and vast, start saving up for tint folks! – windshield, but the old printed antenna seems to have been given the heave-ho in favour of a traditional (and probably cheaper) stubby aerial mounted BMW-style above the rear windshield. Suitably-chunky 16-inch five –spoke alloys round off the major exterior changes.
Inside, the two-tier dashboard has been retained, raked even more steeply toward the driver. The steering wheel is still a three-spoke affair but it now sports two four way controllers on each side instead of the earlier toggles. Gone are the knob-based temperature and fanspeed controls, with a slew of buttons taking their place. That’s below what looks like a double-DIN touch-based navigation system – tuners of the world rejoice, your favourite rolling music platform still lives.
On the far left of the dashboard, you’ll notice a single, very large green button that says “Econ”. On overseas models, pressing this switch sets the engine, transmission and cooling functions to maximum efficiency, although judging by our hot climes, it’s unlikely to get much use here. We didn’t get a chance to look under the hood, but our sources suggest that the engine being tested is a 1.5 litre unit, which if true is significantly smaller than the existing 1.8 140bhp one. Hello fuel efficiency, goodbye acceleration.
Overall, outside of the few details we couldn’t discern, it looks to be a blander, more generic version of a car that should be at the very heartland of Honda thinking. The earlier, space-age Civic landed like an atomic bomb in the compact car market, sending arch-rivals like Toyota and Nissan scurrying back to the drawing board to bring out more exciting-looking sedans.
Now Honda looks to be losing faith in its daring design direction, delivering a cheese-wedge sedan that could easily be mistaken for – whisper it – one of the equally wedgy Koreans that are flooding out of South East Asia. Or perhaps it’s merely a reflection of these austere times where sobriety is a virtue. Either way: we want our old Honda back.
